Chapter Eleven

Of course he wasn't there. In fact, nobody was there. John leaned against the rail, looking down. Deep down below him he could see the time line in its totality. He wondered how it was possible to fit the biological history of mankind onto the floor of a library. With a sigh he turned around again, realising that there was nothing to be seen here. If Sherlock had been here, he had not left a clue. With a grin he checked again, remembering that he had never fully understood that he had left him clues in the first place. But there was nothing.

Then he did what he had not dared to do all day, he thought about the motif behind Sherlock's disappearance. Why would anyone not want him to work with the police? It seemed absurd that someone thought he was playing an important role in their research. The only thing he did do was support Sherlock, usually by asking the wrong questions or failing to see the obvious.

And yet, there was more, he was sure of that. If Sherlock had received a threat in which he was told that they would make him responsible if John did not follow the request to keep himself out of police work, and automatically assumed that it was an impossible task to fulfil, why had the first threat concerned him at all? They could have just as well gotten to Sherlock by inventing a serial killer to lead him into a trap. It just didn't add up.

With a sigh he slowly made his way back down the stairs, watching the last preparations for the opening. He wondered if he was being obvious, and then he remembered that trying not to be obvious gave one away more easily than anything else. So instead of pretending to not observe the preparations, he just sat there for a while and watched them, openly and with interest, and he found that nobody cared. Every now and then he checked his phone, but there were no messages, neither from Lestrade, nor Mycroft, and which still pained him, none from Sherlock.

He wondered for a second if maybe his own phone had been manipulated. Maybe it wasn't Lestrade's phone that had died on him, and maybe it wasn't a problem with Mycroft's connection, but with his own phone. There was only one way to find out.

Chewing on his lower lip, he dialled Sarah's number. Secretly, he hoped she wouldn't answer, but eventually she did, and he exhaled audibly.

"Hello?"

"Sarah, it's me, John."

"Hello John, are you feeling better?"

"I'm not sure." So it wasn't his phone after all that caused the problems. "Listen, I wanted to apologise." He was trying to make up his mind about what he could say to her. Could he tell her the truth? He wasn't ready to confront the truth, and he felt his stomach contract painfully as soon as his mind entered that mine field. No, he had been feeling weird, and he had not been very responsive, and not grateful enough for what she had done for him last night.

"What for?" She sounded strange, distant, as if she had been talking to someone else quietly. He leaped at that chance.

"You're not alone?"

She coughed, nervously. "John, I…"

"You've met someone else?" Even as he said the words he knew they were supposed to hurt, but he wasn't sure whether that would be him or Sarah on the receiving end. A second later he realised that it was hurting her, and that he might have sounded just a tiny bit hopeful.

"What? No! Why would you think such a thing…"

He closed his eyes, cursing himself for his tactless reaction. It would have made things so easy for him. "Jesus," he muttered to himself. Since when had his brain decided to work against him? He loved her…liked her, at least. She was incredibly sweet and extremely supportive and she had taken over his shift today so he could stay in bed and recover from whatever he had caught and now he was insinuating that she had a lover. Not a smooth move, John Watson.

"That's not what I meant to say." He spoke to the silence of the phone. "Sarah, I'm sorry."

Silence.

"Sarah, I don't know what's wrong with me, I shouldn't have said that."

"Well yes, you shouldn't have."

"Who is it then?" Again, the worst thing he could possibly say. Strangely enough he knew that it was, but he didn't mean to hurt her.

"John!"

"I just want to know!" Stubborn now.

"You've never had a reason to be jealous," she said, sounding almost bitter. He felt his heart break just a bit.

"I know."

"But you obviously don't trust me."

He had never taken her for a woman that would react like she did now. She wasn't like that. She was calm, never angry, irritated at the most. But then again, he himself had never given her a reason to be angry, because whenever Sherlock had crashed the party, he had told him off at least half heartedly. But eventually he had stopped caring and almost expected him to show up anyway. Even Sarah had begun to tolerate his presence, and it wasn't like they had been making out or anything that would seem weird if Sherlock was present. True, sometimes the dates didn't end that well, and more than once, he sent her home in a taxi while he went off with Sherlock into the night to solve an urgent case, but she had never really said anything. And maybe she had been angry all along, only he had never realised.

"I do trust you."

He started to understand that what had seemed like a perfect solution might not be so perfect after all. She had tolerated Sherlock, at the most, and of course she had been annoyed by going home alone, and she had never really wanted to come around to Baker Street if there was any way of avoiding it, and really, who could blame her? The body parts and other, even less tolerable things in the kitchen had long stopped putting him off his appetite, but maybe she wasn't adapting so easily?

He understood that what she had done last night, coming around and bringing him soup, and giving him a day off and asking him to leave Sherlock's work alone, all of these things had been a desperate attempt to bring some normalcy to their relationship.

She had every right to be angry with him. And he was an idiot for trying to lay the blame on her. With a sigh he started again.

"I really am sorry. Look, I've just been confused lately, and I haven't been the best person I could be and I…" He didn't quite know how to say what made him shy away from her.

"John," she sounded calm now, disappointed, but calm. "I don't think we can do this anymore!"

"What? Do what?"

"John, us. I'm talking about us. I asked you to stay in and take care of yourself, and now the police are here, asking questions about you and your crazy detective flatmate."

"Sherlock." He interrupted her.

"John, I asked you to live your life, and just now I'm starting to understand that you are doing exactly that. The thing is" she sighed, defeated, "I'm not part of that life. Not in the way I want to be, and now I'm starting to understand that we were never going to be alone. He would always be there and I know you don't want to hurt me, but if you are honest with yourself, you know that I'm right."

"Sarah." She was saying things he had never thought about more deeply. He had wondered briefly about the fact that their relationship was somewhat abnormal from others because of Sherlock. But he had been there when he had met Sarah, he had already become a part of his life that was exciting, different, and sometimes dangerous, and he wouldn't have it any other way. So Sherlock had always been part of the equation, and he had simply supposed that Sarah would be alright with that.

"I'm going to ask you one simple question, a question that I never thought I would ask a man in my life, ever, because it is just wrong to ask that of anyone, but I can't help myself."

John closed his eyes and ran his hand through his hair. She was making him choose. She was making him take sides. The past year flashed before his eyes, and he remembered all those moments which seemed important to him, moments that had seen him extraordinarily happy, or confused, or astonished, excited, or frightened, and, at points lost. A few of them included Sarah. All of them included Sherlock.

"Don't say it." He whispered. "Sarah, please don't say it. I know it's my fault, but I don't want to do this over the phone."

"Well, you're not at home, where I thought you would be, and you have an entire police squad searching your flat. Where are you, John?"

"I'm sorry, I can't tell you. This is too important."

"Well, Detective Inspector Lestrade wants to talk to you."

"No, I can't speak to him. It will put me in danger." And him, he thought. "Sarah, I have to go."

He hung up, feeling his head spin. This was far from what he had expected, and he felt slightly sick, but in the end they were bound to have this conversation. He had felt the tension in the air last night, and she had told him what she expected of him. But of course she had wrapped it in the subtle bubble wrap of words that women use and asked him nicely. He couldn't give her what she wanted.

Only then did he notice tears in his eyes. Jesus, he did not cry, ever. He blamed the fever. He also blamed the fever for the tapping of his finger against the screen of his phone. Lestrade must have found the body of the curator. He wondered whether he had made a mistake in letting him know. He hoped that they would not put one and one together and show up at the British Library. If the police showed up here, they had clearly lost the game and there was no way of telling what would happen.

With an as yet unknown pain in his chest he typed three letters into his phone and sent it to Sarah.

Him

He knew she would cry, but he also knew that she would not hate him, because she had seen what he had been oblivious of. It felt incredibly bad, and it weighed heavily on his conscience, but he had not been fair to her, and she had obviously reached a point where she could not deal with the pain it caused her anymore.

I'm so sorry

He knew it wouldn't help, but he had to say it. And Lestrade would ask her what he had done and his team would give him a hard time about it, next time they saw each other, but maybe that would divert the attention from Sherlock a bit.

He wiped his eyes, suddenly painfully aware that he sat on a bench in the middle of a hall full of people. And he felt that he was being watched. The feeling came out of nowhere, but he was absolutely sure. Trying not to freak himself out, he slowly turned to his right, but nobody was looking at him. Then, as he turned to the left, he saw a figure standing outside, looking inside through the glass front. It was Conny.

Checking the time, he figured that he could spend a few minutes outside, and Conny would bear news, of that he was sure. As he made his way down the flight of stairs that led down to the ground level, he briefly wondered if she was going to tell him that they had found Sherlock, dead. He found that his mind refused to go to that place and he smiled when he left the building and was greeted by icy winds and an excited looking Conny.

"Coffee?" he offered, making her smile.

"Thanks, doctor."

He got coffee from the BL kiosk, fishing for his last change in his pockets and they sat down under Newton, keeping their eyes on the library.

"It's very different here," she remarked.

"Different, how?"

"There's only one kind of people going in there. People who want to know things."

He smiled into his coffee, welcoming the caffeine that slowly made its way through his system.

"But people who walk into a store go there all for one purpose as well, no?"

She actually chuckled and nodded. "I suppose so."

"Conny, why are you here?"

She looked at him, her dirty hair falling into her eyes. "Remember when we told you that we were supposed to watch out for people with duffle bags? I just saw two people go in. The bags were in another bag, but they were clearly duffle bags."

"What kind of people were they?"

"A man and a woman. And they were not the kind of people that go in there." She pointed at the library.

He would have to take her word on that, and she clearly knew how to judge people.

"Have you heard of him?" he sounded hopeful.

The look she gave him reminded him of the one he had received by the night watch last night; as if she knew something that he did not. "Not a word." She said, shrugging. "But don't worry too much. No news is good news, right?"

The clock on the library tower told him that it was only half an hour until the exhibition would formally open.

"Conny, can I do anything for you? Do you need anything that I could get you?"

She smiled. "The brain never told us you were so altruistic. I'm starting to understand why you two get along so well."

He chuckled. "He does make it hard sometimes, though."

"Well, it is very kind of you, but I'm alright. The coffee was lovely, thank you."

John was unsure if he should give her more money, but then he remembered that he had given her the last notes he had had in his wallet yesterday, and the change in his pockets had just been enough for the tea earlier and the coffee now.

But before he could voice his insecurity, she nodded at him and walked away, through the gate and out of sight.

A.N. thanks for the feedback :) I appreciate any kind of criticism! This is my first fic ever, and I'm incredibly glad to hear that you guys like it.